-
Is there a way to make a better DVD out of DV material ?
I’m authoring a bunch of DVDs (in SD ). The source material was recorded in DVCAM, edited in NTSC DV/DVCPRO, exported/redered as QT to be squeezed in Compressor and burn in DVDSP. I had to use a lot of text in the edition and lot more in some menus in DVDSP. Since I know that DV and TEXT don’t end up as a happy couple … I was wondering if there is a way to make these DVDs look better on TVs, specially on LCD TVs. They are looking nice on “old” TVs (they are CRT, right ? ).
Forgive me if I’m going to say an heresy , SD DVDs are made of DV material which has 2 fields for every frame and this material rolling on LCD TVs doesn’t look as good as a progressive material, right ?
So, is there a way to burn the DVD in a way that looks good on both kind of TVs ? -
4 Replies
-
I would say that SD DVDs don’t look good on LCDs because they’re being blown up twice their size. Do jpegs look nice and sharp and pretty when you blow them up twice their size in PhotoShop? Not really. And I haven’t seen TVs or DVD players work any real special magic. If they could, why would we all be buying and shooting expensive HD equipment when there’s a magic button that makes SD look just as pretty as HD?
I don’t think the problem is interlaced. 1080i is interlaced. The LCDs are equipped to handle interlaced. Perhaps, yes, it would blow up better since it would be a sharper image, just as 720p is a sharper image than 1080i.
Text looks just fine on DV format. It may not handle the extemes of color and brightness contrasts like an uncompressed format, but I work with it all the time. AE compresses my animation to it great.
Perhaps an uncompressed SD source rendered in DVDSP would look a little sharper, but it’s still going to be blown up twice it’s size (or more) on an LCD. Are you working with anamorphic or 4:3 BTW? If you’re shooting new material on DV, go anamorphic and shoot progressive for obvious reasons. At least it fills the frame without blowing it up another 33% and cropping off the top and bottom to boot. You’d also have the slight sharpness gain of progressive.
-
How are you bringing in the material to DVDSP?
Depending on your workflow, there may be some good options for you, though they will entail some rendering, potentially significant rendering.
So first thing, after you’ve cut everything, you may want to create a DV50 timeline, render then export.
This will allow all of your ” animation” to utilize the higher quality codec.From there, bring files into Compressor, and use the DVD setting that fits duration-wise.
Unless you really don’t have the time, I would not suggest leaving the encoding to DVDSP.
Let me know if you need any clarification.
-
Fredy,
What I do is change the compressor to ProRes or 8bit uncompressed, and go into the render settings and set it to render in high precision YUV and set the motion setting to best. This will need rendering but it will look as good as it possible can.
Have a wonderful day.
-
I was really thinking about that. But will I need to “render” the sequence after I have changed the settings or Can I just export it ?
My sequences now are DV/DVCPRO NTSC 720/480 Anamorphic (to fill a 16/9 screen).
If I go to “settings” and change the codec ( to PRORES 422 ) and everything else, when I export the sequence as “QuickTime movie, making the movie “self contained” it doesn’t go anamorphic. To make a 16/9 look I have to export it as QuickTime conversion, choose for PRORES 422, and make the “size change” to “current”…..Another newbie question … Do I get any gain in selecting “Enable 4:4:4 Chroma filtering” on PRORES 422 export settings ?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up